“Irrevocable is an astounding new book that ranges across centuries, histories, cultures, and philosophical traditions. Its major achievement—and in this respect the work is absolutely unique—is that it presents philosophical thinking across vast scales of human history from prehistoric to future eons, including cosmological reflections that move through world religions. I consider Lingis to be one of the foremost philosophers writing today, even though and perhaps because he would not neatly fit into the canonical works of the discipline. Straddling the boundaries between philosophy, literature, anthropology, and memoir, his work generates its own genre.”

Gabriele Schwab, University of California-Irvine

"In this rich and unique philosophical narrative, Alphonso Lingis recounts spiritual journeys from Incan Peru to the streets of Paris and Africa to Cambodia’s Truth and Reconciliation Trials. In conversation with Heidegger, he offers meditations on death, with Foucault on madness, with Nietzsche on extreme joy, and through phenomenology his thoughts on the paradoxes of time.  Autobiographical vignettes and the author’s photographs serve as testimony to a profoundly philosophical life."

Cynthia Willett, Emory University

"Alfonso Lingis has a singular presence in the pantheon of contemporary phenomenology. As a sparkling thinker of sensuousness, finitude, and excess (not to mention poet, photographer, and traveler) American philosophy would be an incomparably tamer landscape without him. Irrevocable: A Philosophy of Mortality bears passionate witness to being alive."

David Wood, Vanderbilt University

"More than anything else, Irrevocable provides something rare nowadays: it is a creature that’s not strictly academic, literary, nor autobiographical. Rather, it’s an odd, chimerical little volume. To read it is to listen to the heartbeat of a scholar who has read and written prolifically, watched the nameless dances of a moonlit tribesman, and thought deeply about what it means to live and die."

University Bookman